Kimmy Dora

What I Saw is What I Got: A Reaction Paper to Kimmy Dora (Kambal sa Kiyeme) Surrounded by the SWAT team, two women dressed exactly alike are seen on the rooftop of a building; and then, flashback kicks in. The film highlights the exaggerated sisterly rivalry between Go Dong Hae twins Kimmy and Dora (Eugene Domingo) who both have extreme innate personalities that oppose each other’s. Kimmy’s cantankerousness and immoderate sophistication can be mainly attributed to the typhoid fever she suffered from when she was young.

On the other hand, Dora’s semi-retarded nature resulted from the collision of her head with the toilet bowl when she was unexpectedly born. It is revealed that Kimmy is madly in love with Johnson (Dingdong Dantes), but oddly enough, Johnson is smitten with Dora. Toward the middle of the film, the audience might probably learn to sympathize with Kimmy as it is evident that the people she loves the most, Johnson and her dad, are more affectionate to Dora than to her. Press fast forward and Kimmy is kidnapped instead of Dora, Johnson helps Dora impersonate Kimmy, Mr.

Go Dong Hae (Ariel Ureta) finally finds out that Kimmy was abducted, Kimmy returns to the city after spending some time in the farm she got drifted to, and things are finally back to the way they were. After Kimmy’s return, which seemed to be the time for a decent ending, I thought the film was about to reach its last minutes. I was inaccurate in my estimation. The film stretched on for another thirty minutes or so. To make it worse, the scenes were becoming pointless.

To my dismay, the plot now showed more holes and unnecessary diversions. I did not feel the sentiment that I was supposed to feel with Kimmy and Dora’s reconciliation. “Finally, the real ending”, I mused to myself. Yet, what happened was utterly dreadful. Similar to old Filipino movies in the 80’s and 90’s, the film couldn’t have ended any worse. Kimmy and Dora are seen singing a sentimental song inside Dora’s pink Honda Jazz and after some more cheesy verses, they then gleefully caper and dance in the streets of Fort Bonifacio.

I honestly hoped for the real ending to have more depth so as to make up for the rather unessential extension and the pathetic shallowness present all throughout the film. Being a comedy, the film’s main goal was to make the audience cachinnate and the film potentially made this possible by giving Eugene Domingo a drastic makeover in her overall appearance and disposition. To be brutally honest, Eugene Domingo is known as a comedienne whose popularity roots neither from her sexiness, beauty, cosmopolitanism nor seriousness.

The film depicted her as a swanky tycoon who speaks fluent English – characteristics I could not initially think of Eugene Domingo to be. The irony her character, particularly Kimmy, generated was the film’s main attraction. With the tomfoolery she made out of herself (wearing a tight swimsuit) and the hilariously mortifying seductions she performed, Eugene Domingo made her first major role unforgettable. Though special effects were minimal, they were great distractions that lingered in my mind. To say the least, the animations were below average and dispensable.

I stepped inside the cinema not knowing what the word “kiyeme” meant and I left my seat still unacquainted with the word’s true meaning. Surprising cameos of different celebrities were unsuccessful in enshrouding these inadequacies. Though the film wearied me to the point of wishing the occurrence of technical difficulties to cut the film short, the film wasn’t a total disaster. Amidst all these negative criticisms, I place the film in the same rank with almost all the humor-inducing Filipino films I have seen in the past.

I’ve definitely seen worse. The film’s main fault was that it failed to amuse me. Besides my stiff and somewhat uncommon humor, this failure perhaps may be blamed on the fact that the funniest scenes the film had to offer were already shown in film previews of Kimmy Dora. This awareness of what was going to occur next may have possibly destroyed the chances of me laughing. There was no thrill. What I saw in the trailers was exactly what I got.